Thursday, June 2, 2011

Seventeen Followers!

Fantastic stuff!

To celebrate, a passage from Chesteton's book on William Blake, which amused me this morning:

I have often been haunted with a fancy that the creeds of men might be paralleled and represented in their beverages. Wine might stand for genuine Catholicism and ale for genuine Protestanism; for these at least are real religions with comfort and strength in them. Clean cold Agnosticism would be clean cold water, an excellent thing, if you can get it. Most modern ethical and idealistic movements might be well represented by soda water-- which is a fuss about nothing. Mr Bernard Shaw's philosophy is exactly like black coffee-- it awakens but it does not really inspire. Modern hygienic materialism is very like cocoa; it would be impossible to express one's contempt for it in stronger terms than that.

I think Chesterton was quite hard on cocoa. He famously burned his bridges with one newspaper with the lines:

Cocoa is a cad and cowardCocoa is a vulgar beast.

He was taking a swipe at a cocoa magnate at the time, of course. I hope he was not actually an enemy of cocoa. Of course, hot chocolate is the best of all. I wonder what creed hot chocolate would represent?

Clickworthy...

How do I join the GK Chesterton Society of Ireland?

By sending a mail to irishchesterton@gmail.com, that's how! Membership is free and open to anyone living on the island of Ireland. If you send us your email address, we will send you notifications of upcoming meetings.

Whoever you are, if you have any interest in Chesterton-- join the club!